Acquitted in 'Pizza Connection' Trial, Man Remains in Prison

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Published: July 28, 1988

More than four years after he was arrested in the ''pizza connection'' drug case and more than a year after he became the only defendant acquitted in the record trial that followed, the son of a Sicilian Mafia boss remains in jail in a convoluted immigration case.

The prisoner, 31-year-old Vito Badalamenti, is being held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago while his lawyers and the Government joust over a seemingly arcane point regarding his status in the United States.

Mr. Badalamenti's 65-year-old father, Gaetano Badalamenti, one-time boss of the Sicilian Mafia's ruling commission in Palermo, was convicted with 17 others of running a huge heroin trafficking conspiracy and is serving up to 45 years in the Federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill. The case was nicknamed for the pizzerias and other fronts used to smuggle heroin valued at $1.6 billion into the country between 1979 and 1984. 'Something Very Wrong'

Vito Badalamenti's peculiar case has produced its own morass of litigation, puzzling to those who wonder how someone found not guilty after three years in jail could end up spending 17 more months behind bars.

''I think there's something very wrong with that,'' said Robert Koppelman, Mr. Badalamenti's lawyer in the pizza trial, who ceased representing him upon his acquittal in March 1987.

''The whole case is amazing,'' said Michael Patrick, another New York lawyer who briefly represented Mr. Badalamenti in the immigration proceedings. ''He's acquitted, and he's in jail.''

Through his current lawyer, Donald Kempster of Chicago, Mr. Badalamenti said he did not wish to comment while appeals were pending, for fear of damaging his case.

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, Verne Jervis, said Mr. Badalamenti, an Italian national, could have freely departed the country after his acquittal but chose not to, thereby subjecting himself to deportation proceedings. That assertion is disputed by the defense. Arrested in 1984

After extensive surveillance, Vito and Gaetano Badalamenti were arrested by the Spanish police in Madrid on April 8, 1984, capping a four-year undercover investigation on both sides of the Atlantic and setting off a series of raids by the Federal Bureau of Investigation throughout the United States. Extradited to the United States and unable to post multimillion-dollar bails, they remained in jail throughout the trial.

In the pizza-connection trial in Federal Court in Manhattan - a case that became the longest criminal jury trial on record in the district - the Government played some of 100,000 wiretapped telephone conversations in an effort to prove that Gaetano Badalamenti, at times assisted by Vito, had conspired from exile in Brazil to send heroin and cocaine to Mafia cohorts in the Bonanno family in the United States.

There was testimony that Vito had welcomed one of the drug middlemen, Pietro Alfano - later shot in New York - to Madrid. But the jury found the younger Badalamenti not guilty.

He was given a week to leave the country, according to Mr. Jervis of the immigration service. At one point, the spokesman said, Mr. Badalamenti was about to board a plane at Kennedy International Airport for Paraguay, but changed his mind after learning that the flight would make a stop in Brazil. Case Called Complicated

''He made no serious effort to leave,'' Mr. Jervis said. But two of Mr. Badalamenti's lawyers, Mr. Kempster and Lowell Gettman, said it was more complicated than that.

Mr. Kempster said Mr. Badalamenti had sought to return to Madrid immediately after his acquittal but was told by Spanish authorities that he would be refused entry. Both lawyers said that the Government had then offered to put Mr. Badalamenti aboard the plane to Paraguay and that he was set to go until he learned that the flight would remain in Brazil for several hours.

At that point, Mr. Gettman said, ''everyone involved with the case thought something was up.'' Their fear, he said, was that a trap was being laid to rearrest Mr. Badalementi in Brazil.

No charges were pending there, he said, but Italy might have been preparing a case.

Several days later, according to both Mr. Gettman and Mr. Kempster, Government agents were taking Mr. Badalamenti back to the airport for another flight to Paraguay when they unaccountably turned around and took him into custody.

Because of a shortage of jail space in New York, Mr. Badalamenti was later moved to the Federal correctional center in Chicago.

An immigration judge subsequently held that Mr. Badalamenti, by not leaving the country when he could have after his acquittal, was in effect seeking admission to the United States and could therefore be excluded and deported.

Mr. Badalamenti appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which ordered the case reheard by the immigration judge, Anthony M. DeGaeto in New York. The judge again ruled that he could be excluded, and again the case is on appeal.

Meanwhile Mr. Kempster has filed a separate court challenge, saying the Government erred by subjecting Mr. Badalamenti to new proceedings within 45 days of his acquittal, a violation of the extradition treaty with Spain, the lawyer contended.

He said he was expecting a decision on the immigration appeal in perhaps three to four weeks.